Luke Rockhold has shared the mat with some of the UFC’s greatest legends. The former middleweight champion’s rise to the top coincided with sparring sessions against fellow world champions Khabib Nurmagomedov, Daniel Cormier, and Cain Velasquez.
As a big 185lb fighter, Luke Rockhold is well equipped to defend himself against ‘The Eagle’ and his relentless wrestling, but Cormier and Velasquez had the size to make his life miserable in the gym. However, he says one of the former UFC heavyweight champions gave him a much tougher time in sparring than the other.
During a recent appearance on the Jaxxon podcast, Rockhold was asked if he did a lot of sparring with Cormier and Velasquez, who compete two weight classes above him. The 40-year-old revealed that he spent more time on the mat with ‘DC’ because he was unable to be truly competitive when he sparred with Velasquez.
Cormier is just 5ft 11in and spent a lot of his Hall of Fame career competing at light heavyweight, so he was much easier to deal with than the 6ft 1in, 245lb, Velasquez. “Cain was not fun,” Rockhold admitted. “I had to have Javier [Mendez] put a f*ing leash on Cain, just ready to pull that b**.”
“You know, I would get to him a little bit in the first round, his size and his velocity… He just had wrestling, striking, Jiu Jitsu. He had everything, DC had wrestling. I can play the longer game and get off with kicks and strikes. And then he’d take me down and he couldn’t do all that much, so I’d be able to get back up and we’d have very competitive sparring.”
“Cain, he was just bigger and had everything. At the time, there was nobody who could fing touch Cain. I mean, he was fing insane.”
A brand-new MMA promotion called the Global Fight League is set to launch in 2025, with multiple well-known names and former UFC champions confirmed to be part of the roster. There’s been a mixed response to the Global Fight League announcement, with fans praising the new team-based model and pay structure but criticizing the focus on many former UFC stars – many of whom are now well into their late 30s or early 40s.
Rockhold joins fellow ex-UFC champions Tyron Woodley, Benson Henderson, Anthony Pettis, Andrei Arlovski, Frank Mir, Fabricio Werdum, and Junior dos Santos in the new promotion. Dana White’s MMA league released Rockhold after three consecutive defeats, with the last of them coming against Paulo Costa at UFC 278 in August 2022.
Since then, he’s tried bare-knuckle boxing. Unfortunately, that didn’t end well as Mike Perry punched his teeth in during a second-round TKO debut defeat at BKFC 41 in February 2023. More recently, Rockhold returned to winning ways by stopping Joe Schilling with strikes at Karate Combat 45, which took place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in April.
Now he’s set to fight under MMA rules for the first time in three years. Only time will tell if Rockhold has anything left to offer the sport that made him famous.
